Max on Whistler

I had been great enjoying Lopate's fine selection of Beerbohm's essays, The Prince of Minor Writers, but set it down half-finished a year or two ago.  Life delivered several bruising checks to my delicate ecosystem.  So, as Beerbohm's attention turned toward the situation of obscure corners of The Continent around World War I, mine turned to questions of condominium depreciation, advanced studies in adolescent emotional development, and the appraisal of unusually-shaped lots in Seldovia.

But I always come back to Beerbohm.  Every Christmas, of course, but also when traveling.  There is always a moment on a flight - from just before takeoff until we reach 10,000 feet - when we must sit very still and not enjoy ourselves.  Seats and tray tables must be in the upright position.  Computers must be turned off and stowed.  Even the mild entertainment of the demonstration of life preservers - coming yesterday immediately prior to overflying the Chihuahuan Desert - must come to an end; and  we all share this little moment of austerity.

But there is one small loophole - we are allowed to read a book, or alternatively, a small device such as a Kindle or iPad.  And on that device I have The Prince of Minor Writers.   It was open to a chapter entitled "Whistler's Writing", and who cares, I thought - Whistler was a painter and a talker, who gives a crap about his writing?

Max set me straight, explaining that Whistler is an "immortal" writer:

When I dub Whistler an immortal writer, I do but mean that so long as there are a few people interested in the subtler ramifications of English prose as an art-form, so long will there be a few constantly-recurring readers of The Gentle Art [of Making Enemies]. There are in England, at this moment, a few people to whom prose appeals as an art; but none of them, I think, has yet done justice to Whistler’s prose. None has taken it with the seriousness it deserves. I am not surprised. When a man can express himself through two media, people tend to take him lightly in his use of the medium to which he devotes the lesser time and energy, even though he use that medium not less admirably than the other, and even though they themselves care about it more than they care about the other. Perhaps this very preference in them creates a prejudice against the man who does not share it, and so makes them sceptical of his power...

[H]owever loudly I shall blow my trumpet, not many people will believe my message. For many years to come, it will be the fashion among literary critics to pooh-pooh Whistler, the writer, as an amateur. For Whistler was primarily a painter—not less than was Rossetti primarily a poet, and Disraeli a statesman. And he will not live down quicklier than they the taunt of amateurishness in his secondary art. Nevertheless, I will, for my own pleasure, blow the trumpet.

I grant you, Whistler was an amateur. But you do not dispose of a man by proving him to be an amateur. On the contrary, an amateur with real innate talent may do, must do, more exquisite work than he could if he were a professional. His very ignorance and tentativeness may be, must be, a means of especial grace. Not knowing “how to do things,” having no ready-made and ready-working apparatus, and being in constant fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of his own soul for the best way to express his soul’s meaning. He has to shift for himself, and to do his very best. Consequently, his work has a more personal and fresher quality, and a more exquisite “finish,” than that of a professional, howsoever finely endowed. All of the much that we admire in Walter Pater’s prose comes of the lucky chance that he was an amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him out of Oxford upon the world, the world would have been the richer for the prose of another John Addington Symonds, and would have forfeited Walter Pater’s prose. In other words, we should have lost a half-crown and found a shilling. Had Fate withdrawn from Whistler his vision for form and colour, leaving him only his taste for words and phrases and cadences, Whistler would have settled solidly down to the art of writing, and would have mastered it and, mastering it, have lost that especial quality which the Muse grants only to them who approach her timidly, bashfully, as suitors.

Well then. Point conceded.  But Max has barely begun.  Now he turns to Whistler the painter:

Compare him with other great modern painters. He was a child beside them. They, with sure science, solved roughly and readily problems of modelling and drawing and what not that he never dared to meddle with. It has often been said that his art was an art of evasion. But the reason of the evasion was reverence. He kept himself reverently at a distance. He knew how much he could not do, nor was he ever confident even of the things that he could do; and these things, therefore, he did superlatively well, having to grope for the means in the recesses of his soul. The particular quality of exquisiteness and freshness that gives to all his work, whether on canvas or on stone or on copper, a distinction from and above any contemporary work, and makes it dearer to our eyes and hearts, is a quality that came to him because he was an amateur, and stayed with him because he never ceased to be an amateur.

Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (ca. 1872-5)

There is an almost exact parallel between the two sides of his genius. Nothing could be more absurd than the general view of him as a masterly professional on the one side and a trifling amateur on the other. He was, certainly, a painter who wrote; but, by the slightest movement of Fate’s little finger, he might have been a writer who painted, and this essay have been written not by me from my standpoint, but by some painter, eager to suggest that Whistler’s painting was a quite serious thing.

Then Max says that thing I was saying about Shakespeare and Bronstein, but well:

Read any page of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, and you will hear a voice in it, and see a face in it, and see gestures in it. And none of these is quite like any other known to you. It matters not that you never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You see him and know him here. The voice drawls slowly, quickening to a kind of snap at the end of every sentence, and sometimes sometimes rising to a sudden screech of laughter; and, all the while, the fine fierce eyes of the talker are flashing out at you and his long nervous fingers are tracing extravagant arabesques in the air. No! you need never have seen Whistler to know what he was like. He projected through printed words the clean-cut image and clear-ringing echo of himself. He was a born writer, achieving perfection through pains which must have been infinite for that we see at first sight no trace of them at all.

Adam Gopnick appreciates, mis-appraises, and insults Max in various ways here. His piece is informative and irresponsible, presumptiously ascertaining without evidence that Max is Jewish (despite his denials), and gay-but-celibate, a fascinatingly modern, and utterly incoherent diagnosis.

So I don't sleep with all my friends?!

 

 

Gopnick stumbles into barfight territory when he repeats the calumny that Beerbohm did nothing major.  As if Fabergé could only have fulfilled his potential if he had done a really big egg.  The hell with you Gopnick - it is all major, every last word of it.  And, had you read a bit further in "Whistler's Writing" Beerbohm would have cut you with his own pen:

An exquisite talent like Whistler’s, whether in painting or in writing, is always at its best on a small scale. On a large scale it strays and is distressed...[and] no man who can finely grasp a big theme can play exquisitely round a little one.

 The next essay is about a hat-box.